After segregationist George Wallace’s 1972 presidential campaign was cut down by Arthur Bremer’s four bullets, our own Shirley Chisholm, who was running the first presidential campaign by a woman, visited her rival at his bedside.

“What are your people going to say?” she recalled him asking her as Blacks in her community “crucified” her (her word). “I said, ‘I know what they’re going to say. But I wouldn’t want what happened to you to happen to anyone.’ He cried and cried and cried.”

It was a moving moment in itself, and more so in the context of American history, whose occasional redemptions sometimes counterpoint the hate. It also helped seal Wallace’s move away from segregation. (In his last run for office in 1982, he won 90% of the Black vote.)

The shooting doesn’t have to have been staged for the staging of the response to the shooting to have been so flawlessly, so theatrically brilliant.

Any kind of encounter like that between our current presidential contenders—even if, fortunately, Trump is not in a hospital bed—seems beyond reach. The campaigns, content with the obligatory statements punched out by third-rung speechwriters, are busy figuring out how to leverage the moment to maximum advantage.

It’s been fascinating—frightening, really—to see how quickly the response to Saturday’s Trump assassination attempt followed familiar scripts that turn anything and everything, whether it’s a verbal miscue by U.S. President Joe Biden or a gun-terrorism act against former President Donald Trump, into just another occasion for bellicose marketing. Any measured response, any thought to carving out a moment’s political cooldown that the incident might call for and that this country ought to crave, any glance toward the kind of historical gesture Chisholm understood, is foreign to our scorched-earth elections.

Anything can and will be used to vilify and deify. Medieval pilgrims traded gold for relics such as the alleged thumb of John the Baptist or vials of the alleged blood of Christ from his crucifixion. This will be the first presidential race in history when blood will feature front and center in the Trump campaign’s most iconic image, the candidate bloodied but fist-pumping as an Iwo Jima-flag-like clutch of brawn props him up. Trump is the flag. Trump is America. Welcome to assassination merch.

I am writing this less than 24 hours after the shooting in Butler, Pennsylvania. Trump had the good sense to say that “nothing is known at this time about the shooter,” as so much will be known soon. But the two sides have already staked their ground as if they knew as much about this as we do about Hinkley or Moore or Bremer or Sirhan or Oswald or Zangara or Schrank or… (So many names.)

Sen. J.D. Vance (R-Ohio) figured he’d use the occasion to make a final pitch for the vice presidency, using fascist rhetoric to blame Biden for the shooting and cleverly accusing Biden of using fascist rhetoric to disarm Vance’s own. U.S. Rep. Steve Scalise (R-La.), a Republican who was himself wounded in an act of gun terrorism, piled on, as did of course Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) and her amen corner on Fox and the rest of the reactionary newspeak.

Not that Democrats........

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